McCABE & MRS. MILLER (1971)
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Randwick Ritz, Sydney:
2:45 PM
Friday May 02
6:15 PM
Saturday May 03*
1:15 PM
Monday May 05
Lido Cinemas, Melbourne:
4:25 PM
Thursday May 08
6:45 PM
Saturday May 10*
11:00 AM
Tuesday May 13
*denotes session will include an introduction
Rating: MA15+
Duration: 121 minutes
Country: USA
Language: English
Cast: : Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, Shelley Duvall, Keith Carradine
Director: Robert Altman
SYDNEY TICKETS ⟶
MELBOURNE TICKETS ⟶
2:45 PM
Friday May 02
6:15 PM
Saturday May 03*
1:15 PM
Monday May 05
Lido Cinemas, Melbourne:
4:25 PM
Thursday May 08
6:45 PM
Saturday May 10*
11:00 AM
Tuesday May 13
*denotes session will include an introduction
Rating: MA15+
Duration: 121 minutes
Country: USA
Language: English
Cast: : Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, Shelley Duvall, Keith Carradine
Director: Robert Altman
SYDNEY TICKETS ⟶
MELBOURNE TICKETS ⟶
4K RESTORATION
"(It) is like no other Western ever made, and with it, Robert Altman earns his place as one of the best contemporary directors…Robert Altman has made a dozen films that can be called great in one way or another, but one of them is perfect, and that one is McCabe & Mrs. Miller.” – Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
“McCabe & Mrs. Miller is a beautiful pipe dream of a movie – a fleeting, almost diaphanous vision of what frontier life might have been.” Pauline Kael, The New Yorker, 1971
Robert Altman tweaks the Western genre. He does not leave the town of Presbyterian Church, moves the stock characters – tinhorn gambler, frontier madam – to centre stage, brings the townspeople along, and watches as American 19th century capitalism sets to work on their dreams. Star turns from Warren Beatty, Julie Christie and Vilmos Zsigmond, the cinematographer; Leonard Cohen songs wrap around the action; and “still Robert Altman’s best moment” (Dave Kehr, The Chicago Reader).
Introduced by James Vaughan at Ritz Cinemas and Eloise Ross at Lido Cinemas.
"(It) is like no other Western ever made, and with it, Robert Altman earns his place as one of the best contemporary directors…Robert Altman has made a dozen films that can be called great in one way or another, but one of them is perfect, and that one is McCabe & Mrs. Miller.” – Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
“McCabe & Mrs. Miller is a beautiful pipe dream of a movie – a fleeting, almost diaphanous vision of what frontier life might have been.” Pauline Kael, The New Yorker, 1971
Robert Altman tweaks the Western genre. He does not leave the town of Presbyterian Church, moves the stock characters – tinhorn gambler, frontier madam – to centre stage, brings the townspeople along, and watches as American 19th century capitalism sets to work on their dreams. Star turns from Warren Beatty, Julie Christie and Vilmos Zsigmond, the cinematographer; Leonard Cohen songs wrap around the action; and “still Robert Altman’s best moment” (Dave Kehr, The Chicago Reader).
Introduced by James Vaughan at Ritz Cinemas and Eloise Ross at Lido Cinemas.
FILM NOTES
By Adrian Martin
© Adrian Martin, 28 January 2025
By Adrian Martin
© Adrian Martin, 28 January 2025
Adrian Martin is an Australian-born critic based in Spain.
ROBERT ALTMAN
Robin Wood described Altman circa 1974 as ‘an American director who would like to be “European,” expressing himself not through the elaborated intermediaries of convention and genre but directly, through personal style and an idiosyncratic choice of material.’ (1) To hear or read Robert Altman (1925-2006) testify for himself, his restless wandering between countries, genres, mediums (film, TV, theatre) and production situations had more to do with spontaneous impulse than any artistic intention, career plan or personal ideology: ‘I don’t overthink these things. I have more fun shooting a film than when I’m not making a film. So why not do what pleases me the most?’ (2)
The tales of Altman shoots as (very often) stoner parties are legion. Counter-cultural in inspiration and inclination from head to toe, he established a gregarious atmosphere both behind and in front of the camera. He encouraged his ensemble casts to improvise as expansively as they wished, and even invited them to hang out and view the rushes each evening. At the same time, Altman was no less meticulous than, say, Sidney Lumet or William Friedkin when it came to setting, with his key collaborators in the cinematography, production/costume design and sound departments, the stylistic parameters of each project. Scriptwriting, however, had less importance in his process: a screenplay was less a blueprint than a proposal, a statement of intention. Plenty could change during filming, and everything could be re-shifted in post-production. From such working methods came milestones, including The Long Goodbye (1973), Nashville (1975), 3 Women (1977), The Player (1992), Kansas City (1996), Gosford Park (2001) and, in a beautiful send-off gesture, A Prairie Home Companion (2006).
Ultimately, Altman’s output is one enormous flux, and even the seemingly oddest or most misshapen excursions – such as Brewster McCloud (1970), Popeye (1980) or O.C. and Stiggs (1987) – are part of the wild ride he invited us on. Altman never followed anybody’s preconception of what he should do next to stay “hot”: during the 1980s, for instance, he withdrew from the Hollywood industry to concentrate on filming plays. Beginning as a director in early 1950s TV, he returned to that medium for two triumphant Tanner series (1988 and 2004) – a culmination of both his left-liberal politics (mostly expressed in satire of the other side of the fence) and his wide-open style: multiple characters darting to and fro, actors “living” their parts and riffing off the scripted outline, crowded, multi-layered soundtracks, and an ever-restless, roving, zooming camera. For Robert Altman, cinema was truly a happening – and it’s not hard for a spectator to catch that vibe from the screen.
The tales of Altman shoots as (very often) stoner parties are legion. Counter-cultural in inspiration and inclination from head to toe, he established a gregarious atmosphere both behind and in front of the camera. He encouraged his ensemble casts to improvise as expansively as they wished, and even invited them to hang out and view the rushes each evening. At the same time, Altman was no less meticulous than, say, Sidney Lumet or William Friedkin when it came to setting, with his key collaborators in the cinematography, production/costume design and sound departments, the stylistic parameters of each project. Scriptwriting, however, had less importance in his process: a screenplay was less a blueprint than a proposal, a statement of intention. Plenty could change during filming, and everything could be re-shifted in post-production. From such working methods came milestones, including The Long Goodbye (1973), Nashville (1975), 3 Women (1977), The Player (1992), Kansas City (1996), Gosford Park (2001) and, in a beautiful send-off gesture, A Prairie Home Companion (2006).
Ultimately, Altman’s output is one enormous flux, and even the seemingly oddest or most misshapen excursions – such as Brewster McCloud (1970), Popeye (1980) or O.C. and Stiggs (1987) – are part of the wild ride he invited us on. Altman never followed anybody’s preconception of what he should do next to stay “hot”: during the 1980s, for instance, he withdrew from the Hollywood industry to concentrate on filming plays. Beginning as a director in early 1950s TV, he returned to that medium for two triumphant Tanner series (1988 and 2004) – a culmination of both his left-liberal politics (mostly expressed in satire of the other side of the fence) and his wide-open style: multiple characters darting to and fro, actors “living” their parts and riffing off the scripted outline, crowded, multi-layered soundtracks, and an ever-restless, roving, zooming camera. For Robert Altman, cinema was truly a happening – and it’s not hard for a spectator to catch that vibe from the screen.
THE FILM
Our Non-Affair
Like many teenage cinephiles in the 1970s, I realised that the quickest, easiest, cheapest way to possess a piece of a beloved film was to run an audio cable from my TV set into a humble tape recorder – which is not such a simple procedure today. That’s how, at any rate, I came, once upon a time, to listen so obsessively to the soundtrack (not the soundtrack album – there wasn’t one) of McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971). Even more than the sheer presence of Leonard Cohen’s haunting songs, I was bowled over by the strange dialogue between the lyrics and other elements in the sound mix: Cohen’s ‘I told you …’ echoed, moments later, by Warren Beatty as McCabe mumbling to himself: ‘I told you …’. Was that planned, or a serendipitous collision discovered in editing? Ladies and Gentlemen and others, welcome to the cinema of Robert Altman.
There are two main ways that people have approached this film. As a modern Western – Adrian Danks perceptively ranks it ‘amongst the most classical of anti-Westerns,’ (3) with its call-back to Anthony Mann’s The Far Country (1954), and its basic, generic plotline (stranger comes to town-in-the-making) – and as a jewel in Altman’s auteur crown. In fact, as a relatively early feature in his career, the many trademarks of what would become the familiar Altman style (wandering camera, ubiquitous zoom/telephoto lens, mirrors everywhere, multiple overlapping voices) are here quite restrained, and some of the best scenes, such as the hired gun Butler (Hugh Millais) faking out [tricking] McCabe, are among its most straightforwardly filmed and tightly scripted.
‘Here we seem to be witnesses to a vision of the past’ (4) – Pauline Kael meant this praise of McCabe & Mrs. Miller (in the course of her successful campaign to rescue it from the killing effect of early negative reviews) to indicate that the film allowed us the pleasure of looking into a recreated but real world, spilling out of the frame (and earshot) in all directions, just as in a Jean Renoir movie of the 1930s. We can take her phrasing, however, in a radically different direction. Altman’s vision of the past is not a historical recreation (despite the on-screen credit for research) but a full-scale fantasy imagining of it. In fact, as a Western, it’s veritable Steampunk avant la lettre. Let me explain.
The post-1980s Steampunk movement/craze in art, fiction and film is often described as retro-futurist – i.e., it imagines the future (often post-apocalypse, à la the Mad Max series) as a merry bricolage of old technologies and design themes from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. McCabe & Mrs. Miller’s proudly featured steam vehicle, fitfully chugging along in the snow and rain, is a pure Steampunk emblem! This type of temporal disorientation is, in fact, everywhere in Altman – his little-seen sci-fi, Quintet (1979), regarded by its maker as ‘futuristic primeval’, hit upon its style the moment Altman laid his eyes on a genuine old-vision-of-the-future in disrepair and decide to use it as his principal setting: Montreal’s Expo 67! (5)
Since McCabe & Mrs. Miller is set in an already heavily mythologised past, it can take a lot of liberties with realism (whereas a film it influenced, Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow [2019], does not). And the sheer fact of the matter is that, once Altman flips the improvisation switch for his actors – especially Beatty – there is no way that their fanciful verbal inventions are going to correspond with the historical records of the Old West. Every commentator mentions the supposed anachronism of using Cohen’s songs (the tracks of which were remixed for the film, occasionally stripping out Leonard!), but anachronism is the coin of the realm here. It’s through the inventions in the free-form dialogue, moreover, that one gets to the true heart of the film’s themes and obsessions: its many scatological riffs on body odour, bathing, rotten meat, toiletry, and extravagant sexual dysfunction give us more of Altman’s “vision” than a simple parsing of the pro-or-anti-Western plot can manage.
The title perhaps promises a love story. But such relationships tend to be a melancholic, mutually and perpetually unsatisfying business in Altman’s cinema – business being the operative word in McCabe & Mrs. Miller, since Constance (Julie Christie) advises newly-widowed Ida (Shelley Duvall) that marriage and prostitution amount to exactly the same thing for a woman, performing ‘for bed and board’; the abyss between the sexes yawns wide. The central union between McCabe and Constance thus remains firmly at this transactional level, since she keeps charging him as a client, and he keeps dutifully paying.
The sadness seeps in at another level, though: registered in the many moments in which either McCabe soliloquises to himself about all the romantic feelings he can’t express aloud, or Constance drifts away in an alienated, drugged haze (imagery that Sergio Leone built upon in Once Upon a Time in America (1984) – or both at once. It’s a fine, modern example of what Serge Gainsbourg called, in a 1968 song, l’anamour – and that Mick Harvey cleverly rendered in translation as our non-affair. (6) So, just for a moment, instead of the dulcet tones of Leonard Cohen, imagine you’re hearing this over the final scenes of Altman’s film …
‘Loving you I see
I’ll go astray
And sow poppy-seeds
On the runways of escape
From our non-affair.’
Notes
1. Robin Wood, ‘Robert Altman,’ in Richard Roud (ed.), Cinema: A Critical Dictionary, Volume 1 (Secker & Warburg, 1980), p. 25.
2. James Delson interview with Robert Altman, Fantastic Films (June 1979), p. 30. Reproduced online at: https://seedyroad.com/diversions/quintet.htm.
3. Adrian Danks, ‘Just Some Jesus Looking for a Manger: McCabe & Mrs. Miller’, Senses of Cinema, nos. 9 (September 2000) & 78, <https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2000/cteq/mccabe/>.
4. Pauline Kael, ‘Pipe Dream,’ The New Yorker, 3 July 1971. Reprinted online at: <https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/movies/mccabe-mrs-miller-pauline-kael/>.
5. Delson, pp. 26-28.
6. Mick Harvey, Pink Elephants (Mute, 1997).
Like many teenage cinephiles in the 1970s, I realised that the quickest, easiest, cheapest way to possess a piece of a beloved film was to run an audio cable from my TV set into a humble tape recorder – which is not such a simple procedure today. That’s how, at any rate, I came, once upon a time, to listen so obsessively to the soundtrack (not the soundtrack album – there wasn’t one) of McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971). Even more than the sheer presence of Leonard Cohen’s haunting songs, I was bowled over by the strange dialogue between the lyrics and other elements in the sound mix: Cohen’s ‘I told you …’ echoed, moments later, by Warren Beatty as McCabe mumbling to himself: ‘I told you …’. Was that planned, or a serendipitous collision discovered in editing? Ladies and Gentlemen and others, welcome to the cinema of Robert Altman.
There are two main ways that people have approached this film. As a modern Western – Adrian Danks perceptively ranks it ‘amongst the most classical of anti-Westerns,’ (3) with its call-back to Anthony Mann’s The Far Country (1954), and its basic, generic plotline (stranger comes to town-in-the-making) – and as a jewel in Altman’s auteur crown. In fact, as a relatively early feature in his career, the many trademarks of what would become the familiar Altman style (wandering camera, ubiquitous zoom/telephoto lens, mirrors everywhere, multiple overlapping voices) are here quite restrained, and some of the best scenes, such as the hired gun Butler (Hugh Millais) faking out [tricking] McCabe, are among its most straightforwardly filmed and tightly scripted.
‘Here we seem to be witnesses to a vision of the past’ (4) – Pauline Kael meant this praise of McCabe & Mrs. Miller (in the course of her successful campaign to rescue it from the killing effect of early negative reviews) to indicate that the film allowed us the pleasure of looking into a recreated but real world, spilling out of the frame (and earshot) in all directions, just as in a Jean Renoir movie of the 1930s. We can take her phrasing, however, in a radically different direction. Altman’s vision of the past is not a historical recreation (despite the on-screen credit for research) but a full-scale fantasy imagining of it. In fact, as a Western, it’s veritable Steampunk avant la lettre. Let me explain.
The post-1980s Steampunk movement/craze in art, fiction and film is often described as retro-futurist – i.e., it imagines the future (often post-apocalypse, à la the Mad Max series) as a merry bricolage of old technologies and design themes from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. McCabe & Mrs. Miller’s proudly featured steam vehicle, fitfully chugging along in the snow and rain, is a pure Steampunk emblem! This type of temporal disorientation is, in fact, everywhere in Altman – his little-seen sci-fi, Quintet (1979), regarded by its maker as ‘futuristic primeval’, hit upon its style the moment Altman laid his eyes on a genuine old-vision-of-the-future in disrepair and decide to use it as his principal setting: Montreal’s Expo 67! (5)
Since McCabe & Mrs. Miller is set in an already heavily mythologised past, it can take a lot of liberties with realism (whereas a film it influenced, Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow [2019], does not). And the sheer fact of the matter is that, once Altman flips the improvisation switch for his actors – especially Beatty – there is no way that their fanciful verbal inventions are going to correspond with the historical records of the Old West. Every commentator mentions the supposed anachronism of using Cohen’s songs (the tracks of which were remixed for the film, occasionally stripping out Leonard!), but anachronism is the coin of the realm here. It’s through the inventions in the free-form dialogue, moreover, that one gets to the true heart of the film’s themes and obsessions: its many scatological riffs on body odour, bathing, rotten meat, toiletry, and extravagant sexual dysfunction give us more of Altman’s “vision” than a simple parsing of the pro-or-anti-Western plot can manage.
The title perhaps promises a love story. But such relationships tend to be a melancholic, mutually and perpetually unsatisfying business in Altman’s cinema – business being the operative word in McCabe & Mrs. Miller, since Constance (Julie Christie) advises newly-widowed Ida (Shelley Duvall) that marriage and prostitution amount to exactly the same thing for a woman, performing ‘for bed and board’; the abyss between the sexes yawns wide. The central union between McCabe and Constance thus remains firmly at this transactional level, since she keeps charging him as a client, and he keeps dutifully paying.
The sadness seeps in at another level, though: registered in the many moments in which either McCabe soliloquises to himself about all the romantic feelings he can’t express aloud, or Constance drifts away in an alienated, drugged haze (imagery that Sergio Leone built upon in Once Upon a Time in America (1984) – or both at once. It’s a fine, modern example of what Serge Gainsbourg called, in a 1968 song, l’anamour – and that Mick Harvey cleverly rendered in translation as our non-affair. (6) So, just for a moment, instead of the dulcet tones of Leonard Cohen, imagine you’re hearing this over the final scenes of Altman’s film …
‘Loving you I see
I’ll go astray
And sow poppy-seeds
On the runways of escape
From our non-affair.’
Notes
1. Robin Wood, ‘Robert Altman,’ in Richard Roud (ed.), Cinema: A Critical Dictionary, Volume 1 (Secker & Warburg, 1980), p. 25.
2. James Delson interview with Robert Altman, Fantastic Films (June 1979), p. 30. Reproduced online at: https://seedyroad.com/diversions/quintet.htm.
3. Adrian Danks, ‘Just Some Jesus Looking for a Manger: McCabe & Mrs. Miller’, Senses of Cinema, nos. 9 (September 2000) & 78, <https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2000/cteq/mccabe/>.
4. Pauline Kael, ‘Pipe Dream,’ The New Yorker, 3 July 1971. Reprinted online at: <https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/movies/mccabe-mrs-miller-pauline-kael/>.
5. Delson, pp. 26-28.
6. Mick Harvey, Pink Elephants (Mute, 1997).
THE RESTORATION
Source: DCP Roadshow, Australia
Restored in 4K in 2018 by The Criterion Collection from the 35mm original camera negative and from the original optical audio track
Director: Robert Altman; Production Company: David Foster Productions, Warner Bros; Producer: David Foster, Mitchell Brower; Script: Robert Altman, Brian McKay based on the novel “McCabe” by Edmund Naughton; Photography: Vilmos Zsigmond; Editor: Lou Lombardo; Production Design: Leon Ericksen; Art Direction: Al Locatelli, Philip Thomas; Costumes: Ilse Richter; Music: Leonard Cohen
Cast: Warren Beatty (John McCabe), Julie Christie (Constance Miller), Rene Auberjonois (Sheehan), William Devane (The Lawyer), John Schuck (Smalley), Corey Fischer (Mr Elliott), Bert Remsen (Bart Coyle), Shelley Duvall (Ida Coyle), Keith Carradine (Cowboy), Michael Murphy (Sears)
USA| 1971 | 121 Mins | 4K DCP | Colour| English | MA 15+
Restored in 4K in 2018 by The Criterion Collection from the 35mm original camera negative and from the original optical audio track
Director: Robert Altman; Production Company: David Foster Productions, Warner Bros; Producer: David Foster, Mitchell Brower; Script: Robert Altman, Brian McKay based on the novel “McCabe” by Edmund Naughton; Photography: Vilmos Zsigmond; Editor: Lou Lombardo; Production Design: Leon Ericksen; Art Direction: Al Locatelli, Philip Thomas; Costumes: Ilse Richter; Music: Leonard Cohen
Cast: Warren Beatty (John McCabe), Julie Christie (Constance Miller), Rene Auberjonois (Sheehan), William Devane (The Lawyer), John Schuck (Smalley), Corey Fischer (Mr Elliott), Bert Remsen (Bart Coyle), Shelley Duvall (Ida Coyle), Keith Carradine (Cowboy), Michael Murphy (Sears)
USA| 1971 | 121 Mins | 4K DCP | Colour| English | MA 15+